Flood
by debbiechan
Summary: Ishida is having midnight angst over memories of Soul Society and Orihime.


Flood

by debbiechan

Disclaimer: I don't own Bleach, but Kubo Tite's story won't leave me alone. I write canon filler; my stories take place in the many rooms behind the manga panels. They are not for profit; in fact, they drain what little resources of imagination I have.

Warnings: This piece has Mayuri is in it; expect the usual darkness associated with his character. _SPOILERS FOR SOUL SOCIETY ARC._

Description: Ishida is having midnight angst over his feelings for Orihime and memories of Soul Society. This ficlet takes place before Ryuuken's offer.

My illustration for this fic is here: http/ and running, to find you, to find the words to say to you, and to find what connects us, we keep running and running. -–Kubo Tite, introduction to chapter 181.

Every time he awoke in the darkness, Ishida wasn't sure if he was alive or dead.

Then the outlines of his bedroom desk, the gray windowpanes, and the scant light from outside street lamps became apparent.

Ishida thought he had outgrown nightmares years ago, but evidently he had brought some back with him from Soul Society. The twelfth division captain--whose name he would never forget but preferred not to pronounce, not even in his mind--this Despicable Shinigami was forever running on a rooftop in one dream, charging at Ishida with that golden trident.

There had been no time to think. Ishida, who never panicked, had frozen as the captain had drawn his zanpakutou, calling it by name: _Ashisogi Jizou_. Could Ishida have thought his way out of that one somehow? _Jizou. _He had heard the name and thought of the patron deity of lost children. _Jizou. _And then the vice captain, the mild-looking girl with the long black braid, had charged too, grabbing his shoulder and tumbling with him off the roof….

Ishida turned his face into the pillow. There was no use thinking about it. The battle was over, and _he had lost._

Lost everything. His powers and whatever connected him to Grandfather and the legacy of the Quincy. What was worse, _even when his aim had been so true_, Ishida had lost his intended target: the Despicable Shinigami had stabbed his own throat, turned to liquid and oozed away into the shadows like the stuff of nightmares.

Sometimes Ishida dreamed that he killed the captain and stood over the body ripped with arrows.

He had never killed a person before. Hollows, yes, but they were _no longer persons. _They were monsters and Quincy-eaters who did not deserve the mercy of reincarnation; they fell to Ishida's soul-felling arrows because that was _justice. _

But Ishida didn't know if he believed in justice anymore, not when the Despicable Shinigami still lived.

Even before the twelfth division captain had revealed an unforgivable past, Ishida wanted to kill the man. Ishida had been so purposefully avoiding combat for the sake of Inoue-san, had been running with her down so many corridors, running away from Shinigami, but then--_Kuso!_ The moment the captain began to speak about his _experiments_, his depravity was manifest. The whole world had darkened somehow, as if stricken with some agonizing sickness, and Ishida had felt his fingers clench his bow. An impulse to _kill_ _the sickness_ had swept through his arms.

Had Inoue-san been too busy weeping over the dead to hear what the Despicable Shinigami said? Ishida hoped so.

Ishida had heard not only the words but also the metallic clicking the captain's fingers made as they reached for the girl. The strange white-faced figure had murmured how he would give her clothes for sleeping, drugs for pain … _"I will allow you to eat with your own mouth"_ spoken like an endearment, like a lover's promise.

Inoue-san was not the sort to dwell on scary things. Even if she _had _heard the captain's disgusting voice, Ishida had no doubt that she was snoozing peacefully in her own bed at this very moment.

Was it because she didn't see misery or was it that she _refused to look at it?_

Ishida remembered her kneeling, surrounded by black and red streaks of carnage after the explosions, asking him in a trembling voice if the others were….

"_Dead,"_ Ishida had told her. _"But that is not something your heart should grieve for…."_

A shaft of light from the window turned the bedsheets a lighter blue. Dawn was maybe a couple of hours away, but the mercury lamps were flickering.

Ishida sat up. There would be no going back to sleep. Unless he wanted to miss yet another day of school, he had to catch up on some math assignments that were due this morning.

He expected some of the nighttime gloom to vanish when he switched on his desk lamp, but it didn't. The room felt hellish, oppressive, full of bad air. On the desk, textbooks in their colorful dust covers looked like dumb toys. Who could do trivial algorithms when the skies were full of Evil? When Aizen, Ichimaru, Tousen and … _that Despicable Shinigami _were still out there?

After Aizen's bizarre ascendance, Soul Society had been in emotional tatters. Ishida had hoped, for a few days there, that maybe the Despicable Shinigami had died of his wounds after all. There was no sight of him coming for treatment, as the other captains did, to fourth division headquarters. Inoue had been busy attending to the wounded, always smiling or whispering her incantation: _"I reject…." _It was a miracle how she could do it; no one else, not even the Shinigami, had her powers to banish pain and suffering.

Avoiding tales of woe and battle re-caps (warriors always made up braggarty stuff!), Ishida had tried to distract himself with the Soul Society stitching equipment. The instruments were old-fashioned and the fabrics were coarse, but he had managed to finesse actual pants and shirts out of the unwieldy material. He had cut and sewn white prisoner robes into a Quincy cape and a dress for Kuchiki-san.

Wandering around the Seireitei looking for materials to make tennis shoes, Ishida hadn't so much as glimpsed the twelfth division mad scientist. Then Ishida had overheard two fourth division lackeys talking:

"_Oh no, no, you've got it all wrong. Captain Kurotshuchi didn't take off with Aizen. Kurotshuchi was at the big reconstruction meeting with all the others, saw him myself."_

"_Where's he been hiding then?"_

"_Oh you know the freak. Probably in his lab cooking up ways to get freakier."_

"_Glad he's on our side then. He could stand to get a little freakier if he's getting stronger too."_

Ishida felt himself walking to the window. The very idea of a stronger Captain Mayuri Kurotshuchi!

I_t's too damn hot in here!_

Ishida pulled the window open and jumped to straddle the ledge, one leg bent to his chest, one leg dangling outside. It was his favorite perch, but the muggy typhoon weather of late summer made sitting out here less than refreshing. The air was sticky and there was no breeze.

He unzipped his pajama top, pulled it off, and tossed the ball of fabric into a hamper.

The crate next to the dirty clothes was full of folded school uniforms, and the one next to that was full of school shirts that Ishida had yet to refashion with zippers. _Stupid, inefficient buttons._ The world was full of so much inefficiency. The world was slowed down by so many cumbersome and old-fashioned concepts like buttons. The whole world needed to be retailored.

At one time, Ishida had hoped that he could make the world a better place; he had wanted to reclaim lost Quincy arts and implement their dazzling grace towards the slaying of Hollows and the fulfillment of justice….

Had it all been an over-reaching, adolescent dream?

At some point, the dream burned out. It hadn't happened when Grandfather's glove burned away--no, it had been sometime after that. Sometime after returning from Soul Society, Ishida didn't want to dream anymore. And God forbid that he even try to sleep; the night made clicking noises like metal nails, and a soft, scratchy voice murmured: _"You taste like fear."_

Ishida was only biding time until his next encounter with a Hollow. It was likely. Even though he was prepared for it, would he survive it?

W_hy is it so hot? Why can't I seem to be able to BREATHE?_

The sight of a metal band around his right arm reminded Ishida of his own weakness. The gadget had taken him days to design. The Despicable One had probably constructed who knows what by now. Imagine the technology that could produce such a sinewy extending arm as the Shinigami captain's! How could Earth compete with that? Soul Society had fashioned a limb that could spit out injection needles and full-color photographs--

N_o._

The image flooded his mind.

There would never be any escaping it, not in his dreams, not when he was fully awake, even when dawn broke and killed the nighttime spookiness--_there would always be that photograph of Grandfather before his eyes._

Ishida covered his face with his hands.

A good man, a kind person … _How much had Grandfather suffered?_ Ishida thought of Grandfather's hands breaking dry noodles and dropping them into a steaming pot, those hands cautioning patience, resting on Ishida's head. _"One day you will understand." _Grandfather's hands had been … _missing_ in the photograph. There had only been scorched stumps at the end of his arms. And the arms--! The whole body, mutilated, desecrated….

The humidity was fogging Ishida's glasses. He took them off and rubbed his eyes, but his vision was still cloudy.

Not wanting to cry and hoping that a book title, anything, would distract him from his moroseness, his eyes swept over his desk. Eventually he was going to have to allow himself to fade into ordinariness; he would have to accept the monotony of school; he would become the sort of _Non-Quincy_ person Father had always wanted him to be. What little spirit power he still possessed allowed him to sense the Dead on a night like this, but the hum of each reiatsu was quieter, the sight of every reiraku so faint that what had once been a world teeming with spirit threads seemed like a world unraveling into…

N_othingness._

Ishida felt his heart halt at that concept. He resisted it. No, there _had_ to be some way for him to continue fighting the horror of Hollows. Ishida knew that even if his Quincy senses faded completely, the Dead would always haunt him.

He found himself staring into the crate of shirts needing zippers.

O_kay. _He wasn't going to do math tonight but maybe he could maneuver his fingers through the mindless Zen chore of pulling buttons off stupid school shirts.

He turned his face back towards the black night, felt the dampness of monsoon season meet the dampness in his own eyes.

Somewhere there was comfort; somewhere there was peace.

He tried; he really _tried_ to cheer up. He could no longer manipulate reiraku, but he could still sew. Maybe he could make himself some new clothes patterned all over with blue crosses, to remind himself that he was still a Quincy.

Thinking of sewing reminded him that he and Inoue-san had missed the big craft competition this past summer. Maybe the handicraft club had elected a new president in his absence? Certainly, when he and Inoue-san had been running all over Soul Society, they had missed the Tanabata festival and the tired jokes over Inoue-san's first name: _Orihime. _Ishida felt his breath hitch at the memory. When Inoue-san was frowning, intent on her needlework, the handicraft club members would mock her uncharacteristic seriousness: _"Look,_ _Orihime is at her loom, waiting for her lover…."_

"Orihime," Ishida whispered.

She was the only comfort he could imagine, and that comfort wasn't here.

And the wetness that was flooding his eyes spilled over, running down his cheeks.

E_nd_

The Tanabata Festival on July 7 in Japan celebrates the myth of Orihime, the weaver girl separated from her lover and allowed to meet him only on this day. Typical celebrations involve decoration competitions.

Thanks to LisaB for indulging my Ishida obsession by beta-ing this little piece and for picking up a little Gashapon Ishida for me on her vacation.

Thanks too to Chira-Chira, whose lovely translations and notes on Bleach character names at the Soul Society Manga LJ community greatly influenced this ficlet and my earlier "Your Enemy's Name." Kubo Tite's poems and word plays thrill me. My first transcendent Kubo Tite moment was hearing Don Kanjoni say "Smells like Bad Spirit" and remembering that Bleach was named after Nirvana's first album! I live for poetry, and I would just love to stay up all night talking to Ishida about it.

You can find Chira-Chira's name notes here: _http/ notes:_

A_shisogi Jizou: _The head of Mayuri Kurotshuchi's weapon features a baby's face that resembles Japanese statues of _Jizou_, found at crossroads. _Jizou_ is the kami that protects travelers, lost children, and the souls of the aborted and stillborn.

R_eiatsu_: spirit power

R_eiraku: _spirit threads


End file.
